


Stardew Valley: Night of the Unliving Joja Employees

by Ambitious_Rubbish



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26073826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ambitious_Rubbish/pseuds/Ambitious_Rubbish
Summary: Stardew Valley has been overrun by the greatest plague the world has ever known: leafers.You know, people who spend countless hours in the car, driving to some boring, backwater town, all so they can watch the leaves change color.Also? Zombies.…Probably should have led with that bit.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 12





	1. Jo

**Joanna Lindstrom – Proprietor, Westfall Farm**

Working for Joja is the pinnacle of human misery. Period. End stop.

I should know. I gave several years of my life to those horrible monsters, toiling away endlessly in my own, personal Cubicle Hell. I don’t know what I would have done if my beloved grandfather hadn’t gifted me the deed to his farm all the way out in remote Stardew Valley. I’d probably still enjoy parsnips for one thing.

But all in all, I guess I can’t complain. Coming all the way out here has been good for me.

You know, until the zombie apocalypse came upon us all.

The year is 2260. The place: Pelican Town – Town Square.

…

Sorry. Wrong franchise.

…

Long story short: The Joja warehouse club in Pelican Town exploded one morning.

And I do mean “exploded.” One minute there, the next, a smoldering crater.

No one was in the building at the time. At least, I hope to Yoba there wasn’t. If there were, no one ever found any bodies. Or, should I say, we were never told if they found any bodies. See, no more than a quarter of an hour after the explosion – hell, chunks of debris were still raining down on the town library at the time – Joja BlackOps had sent in attack helicopters and troop transports.

Ever see a quartet of fully stealth-painted Blackhawk transport helos pull a fast-rope troop deployment right in front of you? Yeah, I hadn’t, either.

I couldn’t even tell you how long it took for those guys to jump out of their birds, slide down those ropes and hit the ground running. But it was fast. Scary fast.

Dozens of guys, dressed all in black, of course, with their ridiculous Oakley sunglasses and their super tacti-cool web harnesses and stuff. Armed with brand-spanking new, bleeding-edge German assault rifles. (Because when it comes to guns, Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles, right?) Impressive, yes, but the words “shocking” and “horrifying” come to mind, too. And as soon as they’d hit the ground, they’d started fanning out. “Securing” the area, they told us, though I’m not sure I bought that excuse.

And Pierre certainly didn’t, seeing as how he got butt-stroked by one of those rifles when he tried to get a closer look at what was going on.

We should have said something. Should have done something. I don’t know _what,_ but given what happened next… let’s just say that while I know we couldn’t have stopped any of this – not at that moment at least – that knowledge doesn’t exactly make me feel any better.

\-----

See, unbeknownst to us innocent residents of Pelican Town, Joja had been up to all kinds of no good beneath that warehouse. Like, “secret lab full of nasty biological and chemical agents” kind of “no good.” I mean, I’m not sure why anyone would want to use a wholesalers’ warehouse club as the official front for a top secret weapons lab, but I’m no longer a Joja lackey. And even if I were, I’m glad to say I don’t have the mindset to fathom that kind of thinking.

But whatever the case, we – and I mean all of us – from the Mayor on down just stood back and let Joja do their thing. I guess we figured they’d clean up the mess, and everything would go back to normal. And so they brought in trucks. Trailers filled to the brim with equipment. More helicopters full of guys in lab coats and nerdy horn-rimmed glasses. And even more troops. With all the new arrivals, the population of the town quintupled pretty much overnight. Scary stuff, but no one wanted to make a fuss. This was Joja’s problem, after all. It didn’t affect any of us. Well, not much, anyway.

Shane was out of a job. So was Sam. Pam was stuck eating at Gus’ for a bit. Jodi griped a lot about having to actually shop at Pierre’s. And despite sporting a shiner the size of Clint’s head, Pierre himself was pretty glad for all the sudden extra business. He would happily give away a scathing screed on the evils of the Joja Corporation for free with every purchase.

But the new status quo didn’t last.

These things never do.

\-----

One brisk fall morning… things… started emerging from the crater. And there was no one to stop them since all the armed men normally stationed along the perimeter were conspicuously absent. So when a swarm of human-looking, but definitely NOT human… creatures, started boiling from the crater, with their dead eyes and pallid skin – with their ceaseless chanting of “Join us,” and “Thrive,” well, the town’s immediate and admittedly appropriate response was “panic.”

We learned later, that they’d been testing some kind of serum down there that turned everyone it came into contact with into a mindless corporate drone. Like, even more mindless than your standard corporate drone. And again, I know what that’s like. I’d been there.

And I was there, too, when those first – I guess we might as well call them “zombies,” since they acted just like them – invaded our town.

It was a really good thing I had my sword with me that afternoon.

I mean, it’s not like I expected any of this to happen. I hadn’t set out that morning intending to get into a fight. The plan was to meet Abby over at her place for a little fencing practice. But once those zombies started swarming, was I ever grateful for the blade at my hip. Glorious Ferngill iridium, folded over a thousand times, and vastly superior to any weapon in the world.

The ravenous hordes stood no chance. I beheaded dozens of them with but a single stroke.

But there were hundreds in that festering pit of doom. Perhaps even thousands.

I am ashamed to say I forfeited my honor and retreated from the field of battle. But thankfully, I was not the only one who was equipped for the bloody conflict that was to come.


	2. Kent

**Kent**

Not surprisingly, Kent was one of the few of us even remotely prepared for this sort of thing.

A handful of us had managed to find each other amidst the chaos and we’d taken shelter in Jodi and Kent’s house. But while Jodi did her best to keep us all from falling apart, the fact that her husband hadn’t been seen in days (no one could remember him being around for anything after the undead had first started boiling out of that crater,) was starting to really wear on her. The boys were even worse off. Sam was doing his best to keep it together for his little brother’s sake, but he looked on the verge of totally losing it the instant Vincent was out of the room.

One moonless night, we were all huddled around in the living room. No one could sleep. The TV was broadcasting its usual late-night drivel at low volume. (It gave us some small comfort to know that so far, this… whatever-it-was hadn’t spread beyond the Valley.) The lights in the house were all off to avoid drawing attention to ourselves.

Suddenly I saw movement outside the window. And I wasn’t the only one. All around the room, hands started going for weapons.

And then came the sound of a key turning in a lock.

The front door swung open with an ominous creak.

“DAD?!”

Sam had recognized him first. He was a little grubby – like someone who hadn’t had a shower in a few days, and he hadn’t shaved, either. There were bags under his eyes from exhaustion, but for all that, it was clearly Kent. And he was clearly still human. The boys and their mother all ran to give him a hug.

“C’mon, we need to go,” he grunted, even in the middle of hugging his family.

“Go where?” Jodi asked.

“Just follow me.”

We did.

No one had any better ideas, after all.

Kent led us back outside, but we’d only walked a few feet before he stopped. Amongst the overgrown grass in the backyard was a door that obviously led into a cellar of some sort. The grass was so tall, the light was poor, and the door had been carefully painted so it would blend into the terrain better. No wonder everyone had missed it. Kent bent down and pulled the door open, revealing a set of primitive stairs leading down into the darkness. Even the flashlight he’d retrieved from his pocket did little to pierce through the gloom. But for now, it was all we had – this thin, feeble beam of light, guttering from time to time as the flashlight’s batteries failed, was our only source of illumination as we descended into darkness.

“I… I didn’t even know we _had_ a basement,” said Jodi. She was clinging tightly to Vincent’s hand, hanging on to his chubby little fingers and squeezing them with the kind of freakish strength that can only come from a mother desperate beyond all belief to protect her child.

I, meanwhile, was following Kent so closely that I nearly walked right into his back as he suddenly stopped in his tracks. The stair below his right foot had creaked the instant he’d put his weight on it. And not just one of those “cranky, aging wood” kind of creaks, either. The noise reminded me of the blood-curdling shriek poor Truffleupagus had made when she’d gotten her head stuck in the fence at the south edge of the livestock pasture. To this day I still don’t know how Marnie managed to convince the poor thing that if you can fit your head into a space, you can pull it out of that space, too, but she did. And good thing, because I’ll be honest, in my head, it was looking so bad, I was thinking about cutting my losses and seeing how many sides of bacon I could salvage from that whole mess.

Anyway, we all froze as the staircase creaked underneath us. No one made a sound. No one so much as breathed for a full minute. But when nothing leaped out of the shadows to eat our faces off, we all let out a collective sigh of relief. Apparently no one had heard the creaky stairs but us. We’d gotten lucky.

This time.

Behind me, Penny wrapped an arm possessively around my waist. The poor thing. I swear I could hear her heart pounding. Life in a quiet town like this hadn’t done one whit to prepare her for this kind of burgeoning catastrophe, and I wondered how she would react to whatever it was we’d find at the end of this little sojourn Kent was leading us on.

Eventually, he made it to the bottom of the stairs. Flailed the little electric torch around until the beam lit upon a thin metal chain hanging from the ceiling. He pulled on it, and suddenly there was a cacophony of voices as everyone in our group protested the sudden, stinging brightness.

I saw spots before my eyes for a few, long moments. But when the dazzling finally cleared, I could, at least, see the others of our party.

We looked terrible, there was no other way to put it. Haggard, hair in disarray, eyes sunken from stress, little food, and days without sleep.

“Dad, what are we doing down here?” Sam’s usual flippancy was nowhere to be seen right now. He was all business, just like his father.

“Gearing up.” Kent’s voice was brusque. Well, it was normally brusque, but now there was a new edge to it. An edge none of us in Pelican town had ever heard before. We knew Kent the family man. The slightly broody, slightly moody middle-aged man who spent gridball Sundays drinking cheap beer and grumbling mild invective at his television. We knew the Kent who got up in the middle of the night to go for lonely walks in the grass lot behind his house. And clearly, that grass lot, much like Kent himself, had been hiding quite a bit from everyone. This was a different Kent, all right – the one that had survived the torturous, hellish conditions of a Gotoro POW camp. The Kent that had had to close off all his emotions just to keep from breaking completely under the immense strain of captivity. The Kent that had, very likely, been forced to the very limits of his sanity, such that he’d decided that going on a rampaging killing spree and taking down a dozen enemy soldiers and prison guards without the slightest hint of remorse, was the only way he was ever going to get home to see his wife and sons again. He may have been our best chance of survival at that point, but there wasn’t a single one of us that wasn’t at least a little bit wary.

Kent turned to an enormous stack of crates against the far wall. Standing next to those crates, was a massive, heavy oak cabinet. The cabinet bore a tiny mark next to one of the hinges on the door – I recognized it as Robin’s work. Kent pulled the door open and I heard a sharp gasp of shock from somewhere behind me. Leah maybe. No. Abigail.

“Is… is that a machine gun?” Her voice had gone hoarse. She sounded like she was gargling with nails.

“M60. 7.62 millimeter. Let’s see how those zombie bastards like this.”


	3. Emily

Kent’s stash of “borrowed” military ordnance turned out to be pretty comprehensive. We had enough to outfit an entire infantry platoon. Everything from assorted small arms like rifles, handguns and grenades, to the bigger stuff. Old-school .30 caliber machine guns, and even the odd mortar or two. We left that basement hauling all the hardware we could carry, struggling like overburdened pack animals just to put one foot in front of the other. But we’d need it all. At least, that was the worry.

And so there we were.

We were armed to the teeth. We were mad as hell. We wanted our goddamn town back. And we were sure we weren’t the only ones.

Our first step in taking back what was ours, was Emily and Haley’s house right next door.

But it’d obviously seen better days. The front door was in rough shape. It’d been battered at with fists and feet until the wood had started to splinter. The horde probably would’ve punched right through it and piled in, had the hinges not given way first. The bottom one was a twisted hunk of metal, warped from the force of numerous, massive impacts. The top was only slightly better off, still grudgingly clutching at the ruined slab of oak that had once been a handmade door. I expected that hinge to give up the ghost any second now, but it was awful stubborn, forcing everyone to duck or twist to get into the house proper.

As for the inside of the house, well, that had been trashed, too. Like a small, but violent tornado had torn through the place. Everywhere on the floor were books and the remnants of broken knickknacks that had once festooned the living room shelves. There was a broken picture frame, its glass smashed, left haphazardly on the couch. You could still see the happy family photo behind the cracked remnants of glass. Poignant, in that cliché sort of way.

Then there was the coffee table: upended in what looked to be an attempt at a makeshift barricade, but it was too insubstantial, and the rampaging undead must have simply flowed around it like water skirting a rock in the middle of a stream.

There was a sickening burning smell coming from the kitchen. Leah noticed it first and turned to tell the rest of us, her face locked in a grim scowl. We all feared the worst, but thankfully, it turned out to be just a false alarm. It looked like Haley had been making dinner that evening, and Haley’s culinary skills (or lack of them) was one of those open secrets among the townsfolk. Whatever it was she’d had on the stove had been reduced to ashes and an acrid smoke that wafted through the entire house. Yep. A typical Haley-brand Tuesday night dinner.

I poked my head into Emily’s bedroom. It had been largely untouched, and there was no sign of her inside. Haley’s room was also empty. Neither hide nor hair of either sister. That could be good – it could mean they were somewhere else in town and possibly safe for the time being. Nobody wanted to consider the other option.

We didn’t stay long. I think Jodi’s “Mom instincts” were pushing her to at least tidy up a bit, but there was no time. We turned off the stove, at least. Wouldn’t do to have the house survive this far only to burn down because of an untended stove.

We kept moving, inching our way to the town center as quickly as we dared.

There were lights on in Harvey’s clinic, and something not a one of us had ever expected to see, just outside the door.

About a half dozen Joja zombies were strung up on either side of the door. And more surprisingly, they weren’t dead. Or even dead _again._ They were perfectly normal (you know, as normal as zombies ever get,) functional zombies. Just zombies that looked like they’d been glued to the walls so that their feet couldn’t touch the ground, leaving them unable to free themselves.

Even for zombies, they didn’t look very happy with their predicament.

“What the fu-” Leah swore. Or, rather, she would have, if Jodi hadn’t sent her the most savage of death glares even as she reached out to put her hands over her younger son’s ears. “-fudge.” Leah finished.

I took a closer look to try and figure out what it was that had her so worked up.

Long strips of canvas, just a little taller than an average person and about the same width as one, had been hung up along the outer walls of the building. And then I recognized the material as similar to the bolts of fabric Emily often kept in her room.

She’d created dozens of strips of zombie-sized flypaper.

And the results of her hard work were right in front of us in the form of six groaning, moaning, but completely immobilized zombies.

Fuckin’ A.


	4. Two Sisters, One Harvey

A blue head of hair poked out through the clinic’s door. “Quick! Everyone inside!” Emily whispered as loud as she dared.

We didn’t need to be told twice.

The lot of us broke into a sprint, charging through the open door (while avoiding the zombie-paper) as quick as we could.

Then there was a long minute of gasping and wheezing as everyone took a moment or so to catch their breath and set down the collection of weapons and ammo we’d be lugging around. Emily’s eyes widened at all the gear. They widened even further when Kent reached into his pack and held out something that looked like a red basketball. He didn’t say so much as a single word as he handed it over to her. That awkward business got left to me.

“Um, be careful with that, Em. Solar Essence and Void Essence don’t play nice with each other.”

“What am I supposed to do with a _bomb?_ ” she asked me, still whispering, but this time from near-panic. Her hands were shaking. Emily was not the type of gal who was at ease with implements of explosive destruction. The poor thing wouldn’t hurt a fly if she could help it, and here was enough firepower to level half a city block just being shoved into her hands. Of _course_ she didn’t know what to do with the thing.

And, as always, Kent’s gruff reply was thoroughly unhelpful. “Pull pin. Throw.”

Jodi shot Kent a look of stressed patience. She loved him. She would swear up and down that she did, and I believed her, but it was obvious even she was having a tough time with him, and he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. She sighed softly, rolling her eyes. “Emily, dear, where’s your sister?”

That snapped poor Emily out of her little brain-lock. She set the bomb down on the little table in the clinic’s waiting room – like the world’s most awkward coffee-table-conversation-piece. Oh, how I wished she could… I don’t know… at least find a _box_ for it or something. “Upstairs, with Doctor Harvey. They’ve been working on… well, I don’t know what they’ve been working on. I’ve been down here making sure nobody gets through the front door.”

H & H came down the steps into the waiting room of the clinic about ten seconds later. The doc had some weird electronic contraption in his hands. Haley was staring intently at an iPad and occasionally tapping or poking at the screen. If I knew Haley, she’d probably been flipping through the pages (electronically, of course) of the latest issue of Cosmo.

As for Harvey, I looked a little closer at the gizmo he held in his hands. Was that a-

… right. Harvey had gotten his drone operator’s license a few months back. Now that I knew what to listen for, I could hear a faint, but steady buzzing just outside.

It was Penny, though, who put all the pieces together first.

“Have you been scouting out the area with that?”

Harvey nodded, and his mustache did that weird little twitch it always did when he was trying not to smile too much. “And Haley’s been helping operate the cameras.” At that, she flipped the tablet around so we could all see the screen, and began shuffling through the collection of recon photos they’d taken. I suddenly felt bad for assuming she’d been up to something frivolous, because the photos she’d managed to grab from the drone’s cameras were excellent.

The first shot was of Ground Zero itself. I didn’t know what to make of it. It looked like just a big hole in the ground. Here and there, a stray girder or a bit of still-standing wall decorated the blasted landscape, but for the most part, Haley’s photos showed a desolate hellscape, dotted here and there by wandering zombies.

Down to the south, though, the smithy still looked to have signs of life. There was still smoke climbing from the flue above the forge. That could only mean Clint was still holding out inside. I wasn’t sure how long he could last in there, but I was, at least, reassured that there were few places in town as difficult to get into as a blacksmith’s shop with its heavily reinforced metal door.

Further south, the library hadn’t fared nearly as well. There were more zombies milling around outside, and it was clear that they had gotten in at some point. The main door had been reduced to splinters, and it looked like the glass had been shattered out of a few of the windows, as well. There was no sign of Gunther, either. I could only hope he’d managed to make it to safety before the place was hit.

Then there was Pam’s trailer. Penny clung to me as we scrutinized the photos. Just from a cursory glance, it was easy to see that Pam’s trailer was a rundown mess. It was surrounded by trash and other debris, and the paint was flaking off in huge chunks. But then again, it always looked like that.

“Do you think she’s ok?”

I gave her a hug, trying to reassure her as best as I could. “Your Mom’s a pretty rough and tumble broad, hon. She can handle herself.” The thing was, even I wasn’t sure I believed what I was saying. Everything I knew about my mother in law told me that she could hold her own. But while I’d have put her up against a bus full of annoying, squabbling passengers any day of the week, Joja zombies were a whole other business entirely. Worse, whatever my feelings on the subject, we had no real information to think one way or the other. She could be hurt. She could be dead. Or, she could be passed out on her usual stool at the saloon, after having had eight pints too many. We just didn’t know.

Penny must have sensed my thoughts. She was always pretty good at that. And she flashed me a little smile. It was a sad smile; obviously she was trying very hard not to let her own personal worries get her down, but what really made that smile stand out was that it seemed very much that she was trying to not get _me_ down. Here she was, scared out of her wits at what had become of her mother, and yet _she_ was trying to comfort _me._ How could anyone not love her for that? I sure did. I squeezed her hand, and together, we turned back to Haley’s little presentation.

The next photo in the sequence was one of Lewis’ house, and it, too, looked about the same as it always did. The few undead shuffling about the grounds was a… new addition, and one of them even looked to have gotten itself stuck in a salmonberry bush. Lewis would not be happy about that. He took such pride in his gardening projects. Still, the most important thing to take away from all of this was that it didn’t look like there was any real damage to the property, and maybe even more importantly, the zombies weren’t trying to break into the house. The only down side was that there wasn’t any sign of our esteemed Mayor. So if he wasn’t at his house, then where was he?

But navel gazing wasn’t going to get us anywhere. We looked at the rest of the photos Harvey and Haley’s little recon pass had collected. Similar scenes were playing out through most of the town. There were a few stray zombies here and there, most of them seemingly wandering aimlessly. The only real sizable concentration of them that we’d seen thus far was at the ruined JojaMart. That seemed to be good news. Had we actually gotten lucky? It really did look like only a handful of the awful things had chosen to roam all that far afield of where they’d come out of the ground.

And then we came to an aerial shot of Marnie’s ranch.

I heard Leah gasp.

The shot we had was apparently taken at or near the drone’s flight ceiling, and so the picture was almost too zoomed out to be useful. It was too far away to be able to pick out any particular individuals, but the angle was wide enough that we could see just about everything between Leah’s cottage and the southern edge of the ranch.

It was liberally festooned with undead. An actual, certifiable horde of them. Dozens of them at the very least, and certainly many more than we’d seen gathered anywhere else, short of Ground Zero itself.

If there was any good news to be had, it was that the zombies seemed to be stymied by the waist-high fencing Marnie used to keep her cows and other livestock from wandering off.

The bad news, however, was… well, it was pretty obvious. Just how much good would a few bits of barbed wire and a handful of thin planks do against a concerted effort by a horde of ravenous undead to break into the place?

And clearly, I wasn’t the only one musing over the strategic situation here. We were all thinking pretty much the same thing, it was just that Sam blurted it out first. “We have to help her.”

Vincent was desperately hugging Jodi’s leg. He looked on the verge of tears. “What if Jas is in there?”

Poor kid. I’d be worried, too, if it looked like my BFF was about to get eaten alive by a throng of shambling monsters.

“We can’t just go charging in there,” I said. “There’s too many.”

Kent grunted in agreement. “We’ll give you a base of fire. You sneak in when they’re distracted.”

That could work. It was risky. Intentionally trying to get the attention of a horde of hungry zombies seemed like the dumbest idea ever, but desperate times and all that. I nodded. It might’ve been insane, but I was willing to give it a go.

Kent turned to his family. “Son. I need you and your little brother to run the mortar.”

I’ll admit, I quailed more than a little at the thought of getting artillery support from those two, but again: we were desperate. I let it pass. “I’ll need a small strike team to go with me.”

Abigail pushed her way forward. “I’m in.”

Leah raised a hand. “Me, too.”

“Ok, that settles that. Emily, Haley, you stay here with the doc and keep us up to date on the zombies’ positions.”

“Roger that!” If I didn’t know any better, I could swear Harvey was having _fun._ He’d even brought his hand up to his forehead in something vaguely resembling a salute. Honestly, his eagerness was kinda starting to rub off on me, even if I did think he had a little ways to go before he qualified as an action movie badass. But he was trying. I respected that.

“Everyone ready?” I got a chorus of nods. “Ok, let’s roll out.”


End file.
